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Home
Authors
Iris Murdoch
Irish
Author
About the author
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Equality
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Love
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Love
#Worth
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#People
#Evil
#Lies
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Time
#People
#Flowers
#Joy
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Passion
#Indifference
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#People
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Emotions
#Literature
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Life
#Body
#Indifference
#Yearning
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Truth
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Will
#Comfort
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Love
#People
#Years
#Change
#Marriage
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Comfort
We can only learn to love by loving.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Love
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Life
#World
#Fantasy
#Illusion
#Reality
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Present
#Future
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Writing
#Luck
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Thinking
#Men
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Saying
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Art
#Struggle
Anything that consoles is fake.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Public
#Marriage
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#End
#Being
#Temperament
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Philosophy
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Art
#Death
#Imagination
#Fantasy
#Pornography
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Home
#Man
#Needs
#Quiet
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Marriage
#Giving
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Love
#World
#Eyes
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Being
#Self
#Consciousness
#Happiness
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Life
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Being
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Being
#Woman
#Irish
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Love
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Iris Murdoch,
Irish
Author
#Art
#Soul
#Gods
#Cunning